By Stephen Zunes
October 8, 2001
The use of military force for self-defense is legitimate under international law. Military force for retaliation is not. The magnitude of these initial air strikes raises not only serious legal and moral questions but political concerns as well, as it will likely set back the fight against terrorism.
The use of heavy bombers against a country with few hard targets raises serious doubts about the Bush administration's claim that the attacks are not against the people of Afghanistan. His father offered similarly reassuring words that the U.S. had "no quarrel with the people of Iraq," yet thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed outright during the Gulf War from U.S. air strikes and hundreds of thousands--mostly children--have died from malnutrition and preventable diseases as a result of the postwar sanctions.
It's certainly true that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan has given Osama bin Laden and his supporters sanctuary. But this is not a typical case of state-backed terrorism. As a result of Bin Laden's personal fortune and elaborate international network, he does not need and apparently has not received direct financial or logistical support from the Afghan government. Destroying the limited government resources in Afghanistan, therefore, will not cripple Bin Laden and his cohorts.
The Afghan people are the first and primary victims of the Taliban--perhaps the most totalitarian regime on earth. It is tragic that the U.S. has chosen to victimize them still further through a large-scale military operation that will almost certainly lead to widespread civilian casualties. The Taliban regime has had little concern for the welfare of the Afghan people. As a result, there is widespread hatred of this reactionary theocracy.
The Afghan population has already suffered through a 23-year nightmare of communist dictatorship, foreign invasion, civil war, competing war lords, and fundamentalist rule. The recent bombing adds to this long history of destruction. Indeed, attempting to destroy the country's infrastructure will accomplish little, since that destruction has, in large part, already happened.
The Taliban leaders will likely escape harm in their bunkers or in remote mountain outposts. The victims are likely innocent civilians or unwilling conscripts already suffering under fundamentalist rule. Indeed, it will likely solidify support for the regime and even Bin Laden himself, as people under attack tend to rally around their flag.
The real enemy is Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, which is a decentralized network of underground terrorist cells that operate throughout Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. They do not have much in the way of tangible targets that can be struck--as if Washington were at war with a government. To target Afghanistan seems to be more an act of catharsis than a rational strategy to enhance U.S. security.
To break up these terrorist cells and bring the terrorists to justice, the U.S. needs the cooperation of intelligence services and police agencies in a number of Muslim countries. If the ongoing attacks are seen to be excessive and innocent lives are lost, it will be politically difficult for these regimes to provide the U.S. with the level of cooperation needed.
If there is any logic to Bin Laden's madness, it was probably the hope that the U.S. would overreact militarily, creating an anti-American backlash in the region that would play right into his hands.
To win the war against terrorism, we need to reevaluate our definition of security. The more the U.S. militarizes the Middle East, the less secure we have become. All the sophisticated weaponry, all the brave fighting men and women, and all the talented military leadership we may possess will not stop terrorism as long as our policies cause millions of people hate us.
President George W. Bush is wrong when he claims we are targeted because we are a "beacon for freedom." We are targeted because the support of freedom is not part of our policy in the Middle East, which has instead been based upon alliances with repressive governments and support for military occupation. We would be much safer if the U.S. supported a policy based more on human rights, international law, and sustainable development--and less on arms transfers, air strikes, and punitive sanctions.
(Stephen Zunes <stephen@coho.org> is an associate professor of Politics and chair of the Peace & Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco. He serves as a senior policy analyst and Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus Project, online at www.fpif.org.)
Arming the Taliban's opponents will only deepen the agony of a ruined nation
Jonathan Steele
Saturday October 6, 2001
The Guardian
Ironic, says the TV reporter, as his footage shows sacks of American flour being unloaded for the tide of desperate Afghans fleeing their homes in fear of American attacks. The word is low-key, mildly critical, not daring to stick its neck out. Ironic? Come off it. The policy is crazy. Can decision-makers seriously recommend military action which drives people in terror out of their homes to trek with their families across mountains and deserts and huddle before the closed gates of Pakistan and Iran, and then say we will feed you out of the kindness of our hearts because "our struggle is not with you but with your rulers"?
Before a single cruise missile has been launched, hundreds of thousands of Afghans are already on the move. Imagine the even greater panic and dislocation when the first wave of Tomahawks rolls in and the policy of "bombs and butter" takes off in earnest.
But two weeks of TV coverage of the human misery which is Afghanistan have not been entirely ineffective. They have provided a pause for thought and allowed the desire for revenge to cool. They have also given millions of people a crash course on the reality of this wretched country. A new generation of politicians, who barely knew where the place was a month ago, busily mugs up on the differences between Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazara and Pashtun. Some are starting to understand that this is a place of constantly shifting ethnic, tribal and regional alliances where central government has always been fragile.
Time has also shown how hard it is going to be to prove Osama bin Laden's hand behind the terror attacks, at least for the Muslim world to be convinced. The hijackers' identities are relatively clear. Where they lived and trained over the past few years is also coming into focus. But evidence that their orders came from Bin Laden has not yet been found. The soldiers are dead but the captains, let alone the enemy generals in this war, may never be implicated.
So the target of the planned American attacks is no longer just the suspected mastermind. The aim is being widened, or at least deflected. Unsure where Bin Laden is hiding, and eager for visible signs of success, the Americans - and Tony Blair - proclaim the Taliban leadership is equally legitimate a target. Instead of going for the bull's eye, any hit on the dartboard will be trumpeted as proof we've scored.
The phasing of the promised war is also shifting. Missile strikes will just be the hors d'oeuvre. The main meal will be a sustained campaign to arm the Taliban's opponents, the Northern Alliance, so that they can seize Kabul and take power. We will then help them form a broad-based government and bring back the deposed King Zahir Shah. Afghanistan is in the midst of a civil war. We are not invading but responding to an invitation by one side for aid. The Northern Alliance may not be angels. Their attitudes to women's rights and social progress may be unappetising but they are not as bad as the Taliban. So we are really liberators.
It sounds tempting, even noble. But wrong. I never expected to be an "old Afghan hand". The term sounds irredeemably colonial. But perhaps I deserve the label, as my own crash course in Afghanistan began in 1981 and I have reported from there six times since. On each visit the country had slipped deeper into the jaws of ever-widening war. During the Soviet period, I was in the small and unfashionable minority which came to the view that the Moscow-supported governments of Babrak Karmal and Najibullah were lesser evils compared to the ravages which the CIA- and MI6-backed moja hedin were likely to cause if they ever took power. Ravage Afghanistan they did. In the communist period, Kabul was virtually unscarred by war - and women had rights - but when the mojahedin moved in, they tore it apart.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Pashtun fundamentalist, shelled the city for two years, destroying half its buildings and killing 25,000 civilians because he thought the Tajik wing of the mojahedin "alliance" was not offering him enough power. A year later, Ahmed Shah Massoud, lionised abroad as the greatest leader of the anti-communist and anti-Taliban resistance, turned his guns on his Shi'ite Hazara allies who were concentrated in the western part of Kabul, killing thousands. Yet, in a pattern of cynical warlordism with which Afghan history is replete, Massoud, Hekmatyar and Karim Khalili, the Hazara leader, were allies again within months.
The current talk of a "broad-based government" with the ex-king as its figurehead is also nothing new. UN envoys rushed to his palatial home in Rome in 1988 to urge him to return when the Russians agreed to withdraw. The effort foundered on the king's chronic unwillingness to take a lead, the fact that even among many Pashtun he is not regarded with respect, let alone among non-Pashtun, and on the mojahedins' refusal - ardently supported by Washington - to give any political role to the ex-communists.
But the most promising idea of those bleak times did come from the Americans. The final phase of the Geneva talks, which led to the Soviet withdrawal, centred on the question of arms supplies once the Russians pulled out. The Russians wanted the right to go on aiding their ally, Najibullah, while insisting the Americans, Saudis, and Pakista nis no longer armed the mojahedin. In reply, George Shultz, the secretary of state, proposed "negative symmetry". Both sides would stop arming their clients.
When the Russians refused, the Americans said this was unacceptable and so the two superpowers agreed on exactly the opposite of what Shultz had proposed. There would be "positive symmetry". The phrase is now forgotten but as a euphemism for an arms race it deserves a high rank in the lexicon of linguistic cynicism alongside "collateral damage".
Now is the time to revive "negative symmetry". Instead of giving yet more arms to the Northern Alliance, as Russia and Iran are already doing, and the United States proposes to do, the outside world should be saying enough is enough. Pressurealso needs to be put on Pakistan to end its supplies to the Taliban. No arms embargo is ever complete, especially in a country, such as Afghanistan, with porous borders. But it is far better to press the parties in a civil war to reach a compromise by denying them weapons and fuel for their hardware rather than by Washington's proposed strategy of trying to defeat the Taliban by arming their opponents and aiding them with bombing runs and missile attacks on Taliban positions.
Foreigners have intervened in Afghan politics for too long and always with disastrous results. The country is awash with weapons and already in ruins. The United Nations' efforts to find a political settlement, which were revived four years ago, need to be refocused on the search for a federal structure in which regions and ethnic groups will have greater autonomy. Hope of strong central government in a country so split and traumatised is an illusion. Above all, air strikes and yet more supplies of arms are the wrong way to go.
Our poor, our weak, our hungry
American people are beginning to understand their connection to the whole world. Their leaders must understand it too
Special report: terrorism in the US
Ahdaf Soueif
Saturday September 15, 2001
The Guardian
Thousands of people have been murdered in New York and Washington; America mourns and the world mourns with it.
The American government is readying itself - and the world - for action. This action would seem to derive from the concept of a "clash of civilisations", a school of thought that Islamist extremists subscribe to, since they, we understand, view America, or even the whole of western civilisation, as a hegemonous monolith; an enemy to be feared and, if possible, destroyed.
This is exactly the kind of thinking that thinking people must avoid. And yet it is reciprocated (if indeed it was not initiated) by the west. In the plast decade there has been a growing tendency to see the terms Arab, Muslim, fanatic, even terrorist as practically interchangeable. When EgyptAir flight 990 fell into the Atlantic in 1999 killing 217 people on board the US explained within minutes that the Egyptian pilot was an Islamist fanatic who had decided to commit suicide. Even after Egyptian newspapers published a photo of him with his little daughter holding an inflatable Father Christmas, the US insisted he was an Islamist fanatic.
You could almost say that US officialdom, the media and Hollywood dreamed this nightmare into reality. And ordinary Americans have paid the price. But looking back, it is as though somebody had been working on a series of drafts. A "fanatic" in an Egyptian aircraft, a mystery boat crashing into the side of the USS Cole, and now this horror. Was somebody working out what could be done, what you could get away with? The prime suspect, we are told, is Osama bin Laden. It may have been him. He cannot have expected that this massively criminal act would do him any good, and it has put back - who knows for how long - the causes that we are told he professes to care about.
Why did he do it? Because he hates America and wants to damage her? Because, Iago-like, he revels in his hatred? Then why does he not gloat? Why has he said it was not his doing? The too-easy thing about having a fanatic perpetrator is that you can ignore logical questions to do with purpose and motivation.
What if it wasn't him? What if the men who did it thought they were working for an Arab or Muslim cause - but were not? We saw images of Palestinians dancing in the streets after the news broke. It needs to be said that they were shameful images. It also needs to be said that the same three pictures were shown again and again, that correspondents on Arab news channels said they were isolated incidents and that the scale of the disaster had not yet become clear.
Next day nobody was dancing; the US consul-general in Jerusalem received a 12-inch stack of faxes and condolences from Palestinians and Palestinian organisations. Later, a correspondent in Jerusalem for the Today radio programme reported with surprise that people seemed able to make a distinction between the American people and their bereavement and the American state that had suffered a "deserved" blow. People in the Middle East have learned to make an automatic distinction between the state and the people. It is a faultline that could become more dangerous if regimes are pushed further from their people by the need to placate America in the near future.
America needs to look at its foreign policy, its stance on the international court of justice and the Kyoto agreement, its contribution to the suffering of the Iraqi people, its bombing of Libya and Sudan, its long-standing position on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and ask itself why 16 men were prepared to kill and die to bring down the symbols of American commercial and military might.
No price can be put on the pain that has hit so many people in one instant. How can it be prevented from ever happening again? A letter from a Canadian says: "Nothing justifies what was done on Tuesday. But we must ask ourselves how we have contributed to conditions that cause people to hate us this much. Then we must set about eradicating those conditions and injustices."
The world has had repeated proof that terrorist actions cannot be combated by security measures alone. The underlying cause, the why, has to be addressed. And listening to official responses I am filled with fear. Experts have opined that the US has to hit "someone" within 10 days, that cruise missiles targeted somewhere in the Middle East are the only appropriate action. The deputy secretary of state, Paul Wolfowitz, said that "the whole civilised world has been shocked... and even portions of the uncivilised world have started to wonder whether they're on the wrong side". How's that for the official American view of the planet? There is talk of a $20bn war chest, of the full resources of the American government, of combat patrols over Washington.
It will not be enough. The US will only be safe when the puppetmasters can no longer find people willing to lay down their lives to harm it. The nation that once said "give me your poor, your weak, your hungry" needs to look at itself through the eyes of the world's dispossessed. During the last year, and before the catastrophe, it was starting to do so. It seemed that the people of the most powerful country in the world were starting to let themselves see more clearly what was happening in the world around them. More articles were appearing, more people were asking questions. Sections of the US administration were even demurring slightly at the unconditional, eternal support they were supposed to extend to the state of Israel.
Those people have now joined the ranks of the grieving. It should not have happened. It should not happen again. Maybe it won't, if in their grief Americans make common cause with other sorrowing humans. There is evidence that many are doing just that. And the leaders should listen to their voices.
(Ahdaf Soueif is author of The Map of Love)
Bin Laden is winning the propaganda war
Leader
Tuesday October 9, 2001
The Guardian
The United States and Britain have not merely begun a war with Afghanistan's regime. Despite their predictions of a lengthy struggle, they have also begun a deadly race against time. In military terms, the primary objective now appears to be the overthrow of the country's present rulers as quickly as possible.
By initially focusing their bombers and missiles on the Taliban, the allies seem temporarily to have put the capture of Osama bin Laden and the September 11 suspects to one side. This may be a tacit admission of the continuing difficulty of locating him, let alone catching him. But it also suggests that the world's "most wanted man" is likely to remain at large at least until the government changes in Kabul, at which point the chances of arresting him may improve significantly. That makes speed essential.
So, too, does the onset of winter. Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the defence staff, suggested yesterday that military operations could continue even after the November snows come. But he conceded that deteriorating weather conditions would impair ability to deploy ground forces inside the country. Geoffrey Hoon, the defence secretary, noted, worryingly, that even if the Taliban collapsed, the resulting internal chaos and infighting could also prove a bar to ground operations. Yet ground-level insertion and search-and-destroy missions, by British and other special forces, remain necessary and unavoidable if Bin Laden is to be finally snared. This evident need for haste must not mean that the lives of British soldiers are placed at unnecessary additional risk.
It is too early to make a judgment about whether or not Sunday night's strikes were truly effective. Indeed, independent assessment looks like being impossible. When Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, declares himself satisfied with the accuracy of the attacks, who can contradict him? Absence of any means of non-official verification of allied claims, especially while journalists are denied access to battlefield, is likely to become a vexatious issue in the days and weeks ahead.
Similarly, it is hard to ascertain the truth of Taliban reports of civilian casualties. Despite the enormous media attention the crisis is receiving, the greater part of Afghanistan has become a blind spot, a giant no-go zone. What is happening there now is simply not open to normal scrutiny. With heavy air raids continuing, it is impossible to say with any certainty whether the US and British actions are, as promised, measured and targeted. This war looks like being fought out behind a wall of secrecy far greater than is required for operational security. Here, perhaps, is another reason that western politicians would like a quick result.
The race for "victory" is lent added impetus by fears that the supporting coalition may fall apart. Yesterday's riots in Pakistan, and unrest in other Muslim and Arab countries, may be only a foretaste of a more fundamental turbulence if the conflict proves protracted and intractable. Time is also of the essence in preventing Afghanistan's humanitarian crisis turning into a disaster, both in human and public relations terms. Television cameras may be banned from Kabul and Kandahar. But they can and will record the growing misery in the border refugee camps arising from the Bush-Blair offensive.
Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf understands these concerns very well. He says he hopes for a "short, sharp action" followed by a balanced political and diplomatic settlement. He knows his political survival may depend upon it. Yet the race upon which the US has embarked has no agreed finishing post in Afghanistan or beyond. In this unconventional war without rules, the US alone may decide when it has "won"' - and whether or not it will then move on to attack other countries it deems to be harbouring terrorists.
But of all the time pressures facing Washington and its allies, the daily, upward advancement of Bin Laden towards folk-hero status in the Muslim world is perhaps the most alarming. In political terms, his video disingenuously linking his evil cause with that of Palestine was as potentially devastating as the high-explosive bombs that accompanied its skilfully timed release. This was in effect the opposition's reply to George Bush's address to Congress and Tony Blair's speech in Brighton - every bit as ambitious and far more dramatic. Although the Palestinian Authority was quick to distance itself, Bin Laden's coolly defiant rallying cry will reverberate through an Arab world weary of America's perceived double standards.
Bin Laden is in danger of becoming the dark star of Islam. He is closer now than ever to provoking the war of civilisations that is his life's warped ambition. His hopes of inspiring future generations of suicidal "martyrs", and thus more barbaric mayhem, have never been closer to fulfilment. The Taliban are a loathsome bunch, for sure. But defeating, debunking and demystifying Bin Laden remains this conflict's most urgent priority - and the clock on the time bomb is ticking.
